History of Western Civilisation - Wednesday 5th Period: Discussion 2: Egypt and Crete

[prof-methos.livejournal.com]

Greetings and Salutations, class. Now that your hands are throughly exhausted from taking notes on yesterday's lecture, I'm going to make you talk until your jaw is tired as well.

For your homework, due next Tuesday but turned in to this thread, I'd like you to comment in at least 100 words on some aspect of Egyptian or Cretan civilisation. Bonus points for comparing something between the two.

[[OCD comment threads are up. Comment away!]]

Comments

HOMEWORK: Egypt/Crete

[prof-methos.livejournal.com]

Give me at least one hundred words on either Egypt or Crete. For sources to cut-and-paste research, look in my journal (http://www.livejournal.com/users/prof_methos/) at the list of links to the right.

Re: HOMEWORK: Egypt/Crete

[izzyalienqueen.livejournal.com]

The Minoans were primarily a mercantile people engaged in overseas trade. Their culture, from ca 1700 BC onwards, shows a high degree of organization. Many historians and archaeologists believe that the Minoans were involved in the Bronze Age's important tin trade: tin, alloyed with copper apparently from Cyprus, was used in the manufacture of bronze. The decline of Minoan civilization and the decline in use of bronze tools in favor of superior iron ones seem to be correlated. The Minoan trade in saffron, which originated in the Aegean basin as a natural chromosome mutation, has left fewer material remains: a fresco of saffron-gatherers at Santorini is well-known. This inherited trade pre-dated Minoan civilization: a sense of its rewards may be gained by comparing its value to frankincense, or later, to pepper. Archaeologists tend to emphasize the more durable items of trade: ceramics, copper, and tin, and dramatic luxury finds of gold, and silver.

Re: HOMEWORK: Egypt/Crete

[janet_fraiser]

For 1400 years, no one knew how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Virtually all understanding of it had been lost since the 4th century. The breakthrough came in 1799, after Napoleon's armies captured the Egyptian Nile Delta. A French soldier found the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was carved with an inscription in three different scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic script, and Greek. The Greek inscription was a translation of the other two passages and thus provided the key to translation. Copies of the Rosetta Stone inscription were sent to linguistic experts in Europe. The final breakthrough was made by Jean-François Champollion.


OOC: Your ancient history links section and my ancient history links section are nearly identical. This doesn't surprise me, but it does amuse me. So. Much.

Re: HOMEWORK: Egypt/Crete

[suzotchka.livejournal.com]

Ivanova hands in her homework because the mun forgot about it and is too class-brain-dead to write anything.

Re: HOMEWORK: Egypt/Crete

[bruiser-in-pink.livejournal.com]

Molly turns in her homework because I also forgot about it. It is probably about C level work.

Re: HOMEWORK: Egypt/Crete

[actingltcrumpet.livejournal.com]

Around 1700 BC, a highly sophisticated culture grew up around palace centers on Crete: the Minoans. What they thought, what stories they told, how they narrated their history, are all lost to us. All we have left are their palaces, their incredibly developed visual culture, and their records. Mountains of records. For the Minoans produced a singular civilization in antiquity: one oriented around trade and bureaucracy with little or no evidence of a military state. They built perhaps the single most efficient bureaucracy in antiquity. This unique culture, of course, lasted only a few centuries, and European civilization shifts to Europe itself with the foundation of the military city-states on the mainland of Greece. These were a war-like people oriented around a war-chief; while they seemed to have borrowed elements of Minoan civilization, their's was a culture of battle and conquest. We call them the Myceneans after the best-preserved of their cities, and their greatest accomplishment, it would seem, was the destruction of a large commercial center across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor: Troy. Shortly after this defining event, their civilizations fell into a dark ages, in which Greeks stopped writing and, it seems, abandoned their cities. It was an inauspicious start for the Europeans: while the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians had enjoyed almost two thousand years of continuous civilization, in Europe the experiement began with the brilliance of the Minoan commercial states translated into the brief, war-like city-states of the Myceneans, only to slip back into the tribal groups that had characterized European civilization for almost all of its history.

[OOC: Source: http://www.wsu.edu:8000/~dee/MINOA/MINOANS.HTM]

Re: HOMEWORK: Egypt/Crete

[psi16.livejournal.com]

Having come from a time so far removed from Ancient Egypt and Crete, completing the homework took a great deal more research than Lyta had first thought. Because the idea of mummies had always been something of a curiosity, she chose to research the methods used to create and preserve them in the ancient times.

In Egypt,[i]n order to enter the afterlife, it was important that the deceased have a proper burial with all the correct rituals and traditional funerary equipment. First, the body had to be preserved through mummification, a process by which it was artificially dehydrated and then wrapped in linen bandages. The invention of mummification may have resulted from the practice of burying bodies directly in the ground during the Predynastic Period. The preservative properties of the hot, desiccating sand may have suggested to the Egyptians that survival of the body was necessary for continued existence in the afterlife. Later, in the Early Dynastic Period, when the body was no longer directly surrounded by sand, but was placed in a specially constructed burial chamber, the natural processes of decay set in. When they observed this effect, the Egyptians developed a method for keeping the body intact using resins and natron, a naturally occurring salt.

[The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta has some great images of their collections -- both permanent and on loan -- on their website. I snatched this bit of text from there. The text was from here (http://carlos.emory.edu/COLLECTION/EGYPT/egypt08.html) and more images can be found here (http://carlos.emory.edu/COLLECTION/).]